There have been evaluations of other products over the years. We do layer some of them to filter things through multiple product vendors, so if there ever is a vulnerability with Cisco, hopefully one of these other ones would catch it, or vice-versa.

But we have never evaluated others with a view to potentially replacing Cisco in our network. That's because of Cisco's being the largest network company in the world. When you have Cisco, it's hard to go away from them for any reason.

When it comes with the firewall side, one of the major differences does have to do with Talos. I've been involved in networks where Palo Altos have been broken and owned by hackers. I've been brought in to work on networks that way. The solution in those cases has been to replace with Cisco, to get control of what's going on. A lot of that has to do with Talos and their frequency of updates and how well they do with all of the security items. That's probably one of the main reasons that we don't ever look at a replacement for Cisco. We'll use other products in conjunction with it, but never to replace it.

We evaluated Check Point. One of the pros was that we're a Cisco house, so having Cisco Firepower is useful.

Also, the architectural differences between Check Point and Firepower lend themselves to Firepower. The Check Point architecture is a bit more complicated.

It's a bit more complex to deploy and a bit more difficult to troubleshoot. I think troubleshooting with Firepower is much more intuitive, so it's easy for the operations guys to manage, and it's easy for people to consume.

In most next-generation products, the UA itself will manage a lot of things, but it's easier to find people with expertise. If you put 10 firewall experts in the room, six will be talking about Cisco, but you can hardly find one or two people talking about Check Point or Palo Alto. Others would be more talking about Sophos, FortiGate, etc.

We actually did look at another vendor when we were looking at initially grabbing Firepower, to bring in as our corporate firewall and our main inspection engine. So we did look at Palo Alto and we also looked at Juniper SRX series, but both of those didn't really have the overall manageability and tightness with the Cisco infrastructure as we would want it to. So there was nothing necessarily security-wise wrong with them, but they were not a good fit for our environment.

I don't know. I wasn't with the organization then.

I learned about Fortinet and Palo Alto firewalls. I think FortiGate is easier to set up and manage. At the same time, Cisco firewalls are pretty secure and reliable. I think the ASA Firewall is in the top five.

In terms of improving it, they're doing a really good job in a competitive landscape against some of the other vendors out there. The new Firepower 3000 series was a great addition to the portfolio and really stacks up, price-wise, well against some of the other vendors out there. A year ago, that was one thing that I would've commented on, but they've done a pretty good job of filling that niche.

There are some other good solutions out there. There are a lot of other successful firewall vendors. But when I compare a Palo Alto, or a Fortinet, or SonicWall, or something like that against Cisco, it's a tough comparison. Cisco has the ecosystem of security products that all tie in together, integrate really well together. There are lots of good dashboards and observability built into the product. That's where they've got a leg up on their competition. 

We evaluated a lot of the providers: Juniper, Palo Alto, Check Point, and Fortinet. Our technical team really researched things for a considerable amount of time, and they came up with a decision that this would be the best.

Cisco was chosen because there were many features according to assessments made by other users and as noted in technical data sheets we looked at during the research. They came up with a few features which are better than what other products have. 

Also, especially when you have been a long-time user of Cisco products and services, we found that from a budget perspective it was going to be much more preferable than the others.

My understanding is that Check Point and Fortinet that were evaluated, at the end.

I wasn't around when we did the actual bake-off. I came in when a solution was picked. I was told why the solution was picked and I was there when they did the final install. It was managed for a little while by Presidio and then it was given to us.

We looked at what we had and saw that Cisco was much better.

I have previously used FortiGate and Palo Alto solutions. When comparing them to this solution they have more standard features in their normal firewall this one does not.

The closest competitor that matches Cisco Firepower is Palo Alto, and the feature sets are quite comparable for both of them. One issue I have noticed with Cisco's product is the SSL decryption when used by clients connecting from inside to outside the Internet. 

Cisco lacks the ability to check CRLs or OCSP certificate status unless we manually upload them, which is impractical for a large number of items like emails. On the other hand, Palo Alto lacks the ability to inspect the traffic within the firewall tunnel, which is a useful feature to have. 

I deal with a lot of other vendors who also offer the same features, but Cisco Secure Firewall stands out on the analytics. It is the best for analytics and getting the reporting data.

I'm the CIO here. When I came here, I did an audit of the IT infrastructure to see what was there. I looked at what was existing and thought of improvement. I got in all the vendors and had a meeting with them. I also got in a Cisco vendor and sat down with him and told him about the implementation I wanted. Because of the cost, I didn't change any equipment. So, he did the implementation. At any other place, I would look at the users and implement what is easy for them to manage. For a big enterprise with a whole crew, I would definitely consider Cisco. For any other place, I would go for Fortinet. Cisco is harder to implement and manage, but its stability is good. It is also more expensive. There are other cheaper solutions I would have gone for, but I had to focus on what was existing and improve. I had to make sure I worked with what was existing. We also have Cisco switches.

I have worked with Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Sophos. I work a lot more with Palo Alto and Cisco Firepower. I find them to be very easy in terms of management operations. Fortinet is also a vendor where we see the ease of use, but in terms of troubleshooting, it is more complex than Firepower and Palo Alto. Sophos is the hardest one for me to use.

I love the IPS more on the Cisco Firepower, where you can do more tweaking compared to the other solutions. Where I love Palo Alto and Fortinet more compared to Firepower is that you still have CLI access to some configs instead of going through the UI and pushing some configs. When you are in big trouble, sometimes the command line is easier to push a lot more configs than doing some clicks and pushing them through the UI.

Compared to the other vendors, Firepower requires more deep dive skills on the IPS stuff to make it work and ensure that you are protected. If you go with the basic one in the package, you will be protected, but not so much. So, you need to have more deep dive knowledge on the IPS to be sure that you can tweak it and you can protect yourself.

Another Cisco Firepower advantage would be the Talos database. That is a big advantage compared to other solutions.

In terms of threat defense, we have a feature of TLS 1.3 that is free where we can see applications without doing any SSL inspection, which can increase the performance of the firewall without doing some deep dive inspection. At the same time, we keep some visibility of what application is going through. Therefore, we have a win-win situation if one wants to protect against some specific applications.

We're currently looking into a new firewall - something that is Next Generation. We don't know what it will be yet, however, we are considering Cisco, Fortinet, or Palo Alto.

It's my understanding that Fortinet is better in graphics and has a better user experience than Cisco, however, I haven't had a chance to test anything out.

We ultimately chose Cisco Secure Firewall because it came with a strong recommendation from one of our strong partners.

From the user perspective, the reporting and other features are easy to use and user-friendly, but the Control feature of Firepower needs improvement, especially when comparing Firepower to Check Point NGFW.

I have also worked with Check Point and Palo Alto. The support is much better with Cisco than Check Point. Check Point had a little bit better of a central management station. Whereas, Cisco with the FMC is a little different as far as there are still some features that are being added to the FMC, which is good. As far as Palo Alto goes, they are quite comparable as far as their functionality and feature sets. Cisco wins for me because it has Snort, which is a known standard for IPS, which is good. Also, Cisco has the Talos group, which is the largest group out there for security hunting.

Check Point was the easiest as far as user-friendliness and its GUI. After that, Cisco and Palo Alto would be kind of tied for ease of use.

I work for a Cisco partner, so we are very Cisco-focused. Most of our customers consume predominantly all Cisco solutions. We have some customers who may have the odd product that is not Cisco, but a majority of their security suite will be Cisco.

I have some experience with budget firewall platforms, like SonicWall and WatchGuard, but these are not really comparable to Cisco in terms of being direct competitors. It would be like me trying to compare a performance car against a budget economy car. It is not a fair comparison.

We also use Cisco Umbrella, and I may use features from that product, depending on where I am.

This fall, we evaluated firewall equipment from Juniper Networks. This is a limitation for Cisco, as their pricing is too high. The fact is when I need to install and manage an enterprise network, Cisco has the capability of having support for the IC Treadway standards. Furthermore, I can actually manage my entire enterprise network in one dashboard. 

If I bring in tech from the outside, like Palo Alto Networks equipment, that won't be able to integrate with my regular Cisco environment. 

With Cisco devices, it was easier for me to grab the assets required on the network for installation. With other solutions providers, good luck managing that with any ease.

I've done a Palo Alto before, and a Juniper once, but mostly ASAs and Firepowers.

Naturally, I prefer Cisco stuff. [For the Palo Alto deployment] they just said, "Oh, you know, firewalls", and that's why the customer wanted Palos, so that's what I had to do. I had to figure it out. I learned something new, but my preference is Cisco firewalls.

I just like the granularity of the configuration [with Cisco]. I've never had any customers complain after I put it in, "Hey, we got hacked," or "There are some holes in the firewall," or any type of security vulnerabilities, malware, ransomware, or anything like that. You can tighten up the enterprise really well, security-wise.

Everything is GUI-based now, so to me, that's not really a difference. The Palos and the Junipers, I don't know what improvements they have made because [I worked on] those over five or six years ago. I can't even really speak to that.

When we were looking for a product, we put it through tender and we put out specifications of the product that we required. Cisco had the lowest price. We evaluated the L1 after it was technically qualifying. That is how we acquired it.

We looked at Palo Alto, however, it was far too costly.

From a security perspective, generally, there are only three solutions that our company looks at, which include Check Point in the last four or five years, among other options like Palo Alto and Cisco.

We looked at Check Point, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and a bunch of others. The management and support for the CIsco product is better.

Aside from the user interface, which is getting better, Cisco is at the top for functionality and in all other respects. We work with Fortinet, Checkpoint, and we used to work with Juniper, in addition to Cisco.

With Cisco, there are a lot of features such as the network map. Cisco builds the whole network map of the machines you have behind your firewall and gives you insight into the vulnerabilities and attributes that the host has. Checkpoint and Fortinet don't have that functionality directly on the firewall. They don't give you that direct visibility into the host, such as which operating the host has.

We don't work with Juniper anymore because its user interface is really not okay. You only have the CLI or you have to use Security Director for management, which is very complex and not user-friendly. That is why we abandoned Juniper as a product.

I would rate Cisco at eight out of 10 overall, and Check Point would be a seven. Check Point fields a great solution in this space, but they have very bad support, and support is one of the most important things. Having great blogs doesn't help if support doesn't come through when you need it.

Before ASA, we were using Juniper. It had a GUI, but the CLI part of Juniper was difficult. The network administrators required a little bit of a different type of expertise. Juniper was very good, but its CLI wasn't as simple as Cisco's. When somebody new comes into the company to work on the firewall, the Cisco learning curve is relatively short and easy.

Nowadays, everybody is working with Cisco. Juniper has almost been phased out. Some people use Juniper for certain reasons, but there's a very specific clientele for it.

We went with Cisco because it is very easy to operate. It provided next-generation firewalling when it came out with ASA plus Sourcefire IPS. That was very effective at that time, compared to the others.

These days, Palo Alto is matching Cisco and, in some ways, Palo Alto is better. From 2015 to 2018/19, Cisco was considered to be the best. The security leaders are always preferred and Cisco was a leader. That's why we preferred it.

We were also always happy with Cisco support. It was very convenient to get to Cisco support, and it was very prompt and effective. They really solved our problems.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Palo Alto. I really liked their firewall platform, their Panorama management platform, and wildfire technology. Their SSL VPN was seriously lacking. This is a decent option to consider as well.

I have evaluated FortiGate firewalls and when comparing with this solution there is no clear better solution, they each have their pros and cons.

I have used one of Cisco's competitors and am fairly familiar with it: Palo Alto. I am also familiar with the Barracuda solution. I would say Palo is comparable with Firepower to some degree. The Barracuda solutions that I've used are nowhere near as close in terms of capability, metrics, user interface, or anything like that to Cisco.

Palo Alto and Cisco are about the same in terms of application visibility, user assignments, and attributions. They are comparable. On the threat side is where I think Firepower is better. It's able to identify and characterize better. It's also able to deliver metrics around that information in a clearer fashion. As an example, it is easier to extract fields and values in the log. It seems that the design of the appliance was focused around security, which is evident in how that information is being presented, both in the Firepower Management Console as well as in the log.

We also evaluated Check Point, Palo Alto, Sophos, and Cisco ASA. In the beginning, we thought about going for Cisco ASA but were told that Firepower was the newest solution. We met with Cisco and they told us that they were giving more attention going forward to Firepower than the ASA product.

We did a small POC running in parallel with Fortinet. We evaluated reports, capability, and the people involved. Palo Alto was one of the closest competitors because they have threat intelligence report in their dashboard. However, we decided not to go with Palo Alto because of the price and support.

We use Juniper as well.

We also evaluated Zscaler, which is more cloud-based. It was pretty new and has a lack of support on the system side.

We do deploy other manufacturers' equipment as well, but if I were to deploy a solution with firewalling, my number-one choice would probably be Cisco ASA or the FTD image or Cisco Meraki MX.

The flexibility you have in a Cisco ASA solution is generally much greater than that of others in the marketplace. 

For any Cisco environment, we choose Cisco because it comes down to support. If the network is Cisco, then you have one throat to choke. If there is a network issue, there's no way that Cisco can say, "It's the HP switch you've got down in the access layer."

This is my first recommendation for firewalls, and my second recommendation is Fortinet FortiGate.

The other option we considered was Kerio. I tried to contact their office in Russia, but it is in the UK. I wanted to communicate with them because we cannot buy things without a warranty.

We considered buying Kerio products with the warranty, but they said we needed to send the device to them to repair it. This meant it would take too much time to replace it. In Georgia, we need a local distributor, i.e. a local representative here who we can work with, so that's the problem.

We considered using a different solution such as Check Point or Huawei. We chose to stay with Cisco because we're experienced with Cisco and because of the support.

At the time, we looked at Juniper and at Palo Alto. We didn't get a feeling of confidence with Palo Alto. We didn't feel that it offered the visibility into traffic that we were looking for.

Not all of our customers use Cisco and that means we have competition inside our company with Check Point. We also made some attempts with Palo Alto Firewalls, long before we became Cisco partners, but somehow it didn't work for us.

I enjoy working with Cisco because it's more of a networking-guy approach. It reminds me a lot of all the other Cisco equipment, like their switches and routers. The experience is similar.

I haven't worked a lot with Checkpoint firewalls, but I like how they look. What I don't really like is the way you configure them because it's very different from what networking guys are used to doing. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just different. It's not for me. Maybe it appeals more to server guys. Cisco has a more network-centric approach.

We always evaluate various other options.

We evaluated other options, but that was a long time ago. We went with Cisco because it is so robust as well as because they have been able to integrate their solutions into many different architectures. That makes their products easier to use.

I evaluated Check Point, Palo Alto, and Fortinet, but Cisco won the race. Since we were already running most of our other networking with Cisco, it felt natural to land on Cisco.

We have a variety of providers from Juniper to Palo Alto, et cetera. But the Cisco GUI is pretty consistent, so most individuals catch on. But when it comes to the Firepower, we're going to need some more training on that, as we're upgrading and moving to the Firepower.

I have worked with many other firewall vendors in both production and lab environments such as CheckPoint, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Juniper, but to be honest I find Cisco's firewall solutions and Palo Alto's firewall solution to be the best.

Cisco is the most tested product and is more reliable than others. But Cisco needs to work on the security side, like website protection and application behavior. We have more than 40 locations around the world and all our customers are expecting Cisco. If Cisco provides the best solution, we can go with Cisco rather than with other vendors.

Palo Alto gives the best solution these days, but the problem is that documentation of the complete solution is not available on their site. Also, Palo Alto's support is not as good as Cisco's. We don't have a strong bond with Palo Alto. The longer the relationship with any vendor, the more trust you have and the more it is stable. We are more comfortable with Cisco, compared to Palo Alto.

We chose Cisco Secure Firewall because we were already using Cisco switch routers and other products, so we wanted everything to be from one provider. However, we do use other products as an additional security measure.

We did an evaluation with Check Point.

We can build GRE tunnels. Whereas, Firepower can't route traffic nor do a bit more traffic engineering within the VPN tunnels. This is what I like about using ASAs over Firepower.

Firepower Threat Defense has a mode where you can manage multiple firewalls through a single device. 

I really like how Palo Alto does a much better job separating the network functions from the firewalling functions.

I would consider if there is a need to centralize all the configurations. If you have many locations and want to centrally manage it, I would use the ASA to connect to a small number of occasions. As that grew, I would look for a solution where I could centrally manage the policies, then have a little more autonomous control over the networking piece of it.

We wanted to integrate Firepower with our solution, but it didn't have the capability to accommodate our bandwidth since they only had two 10 gig interfaces on the box. We run way more than that through our network because we are a service provider, providing Internet to our customers.

We continue to support, integrate, and sell three out of the major four vendors: Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco. Every vendor has been a great partner with us, so I don't want to showcase one firewall platform over another.

Palo Alto is arguably the most mature out of the group when it comes to the firewall in general, but they've also been developing on the same platform for quite a long time.

FortiGate, on the other hand, is great in a lot of use cases.

Cisco's strength is how it integrates with the security portfolio at Cisco. When you have a lot of other security products or integrations, Firepower really stands out above the rest. Palo Alto and Fortinet, although they can integrate with SDA to some degree, they don't integrate to the same depths as Firepower. You really start to see the benefits of Firepower in your organization when you're looking at the Cisco security stack. That's what I would argue is one of the biggest benefits of Cisco in general, that stack of products.

With Cisco, it's not necessarily about a single piece, it's definitely about how they all can communicate and talk to each other, and how information is shared between the components, so that you can create a unified approach to security. Their SecureX product is an integration point. It brings together a lot of that information from different product lines in one place. That's really Cisco's game. Some of the other security vendors struggle to keep up with the breadth and depth of what Cisco is doing in all those different spaces.

In terms of ease of management, Firepower is an enterprise product. While FDM [Firepower Device Manager] is really easy to use, FMC has a lot more knobs to turn. Comparing FortiGate to FMC, a lot of the capabilities of FortiGate are still at the CLI level only. Palo Alto is 100 percent UI-based, not that you can't configure a Palo Alto from CLI, but I don't think anybody does that.

You cannot compare Cisco ASA Firewall with any of the new-generation firewalls because they are at a higher level than Cisco ASA Firewall. They are at a different level.

We also use Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sophos, and Check Point.

One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue.

The other issue is the upgrading process, with Cisco. Sometimes, if we use a standalone device we need to create maintenance windows at that time and we need to restart Firepower. But with other vendors, like Palo Alto, there is no need to update in that way.

If they mitigated these two things, Cisco would be number-one in the world in the security domain.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We trust Cisco. It's a very good product and well known in the market.

We did have knowledge of other products, but we chose this solution because it facilitates the sharing of information with their knowledge base. It helps you learn from scratch.

We did evaluate another option, but we stayed with the Cisco solution because it's trustworthy.

We are just a branch bank. The decision is not made here and the branches just have to follow the central policy.

We are in the middle of an upgrade to the newer Firepowers.

We have used Palo Alto for another solution and they have a better firewall. It is a whole new GUI to learn. With Palo Alto, you simply get one code, then that is your firewall. With the newer Firepowers, there are two or three different ways that you can run it. So, we currently have our data center running in ASA code, then we are doing it a different way with our edge ASA. My supervisor has complained about all the different ways that the new hardware can be configured and installed.

We have several brands of firewalls in our organization. Compared to them, the ease of management of the Cisco firewalls is pretty good.

We haven't evaluated any other options. The only thing that may ever force us in that direction would be cost. Only if the cost of the solution got so large would we have to look at something comparable.

I was considering going to the ISA550W (the replacement for the SA520W) or a 5505. I ultimately went with the 5512-x due to its speed and software licensing model.

We've evaluated other solutions. We've been consulted to use competitors' products. There are things that are good with those competitors, but everything has two sides.

We choose Cisco because we are a Cisco partner, so we only recommend Cisco products. They believe in us, so we have a good relationship with them. 

Prior to Firepower, we were Cisco customers and did not look to other vendors.

Given the problems that we have had with Cisco, we are moving away from them. We are now trying to implement FortiGate and have started working with it. One thing that we have found is that the Fortinet technical support is very bad.

We did evaluate other vendors.

I have used CheckPoint, Palo Alto, Juniper, and FortiGate. The Palo Alto solution is complete. 

If I choose Cisco Firepower it is mostly because of its integration with other solutions. When the customer has several Cisco solutions, I put Cisco Firepower on top of them. But if the customer has a complex environment, I generally prefer other solutions.

The solution's ability to provide visibility into threats is fine, but the Fortinet and Check Point solutions have better dashboards and information about visibility.

When you compare Cisco ASA Firewall with Sophos, they are more or less the same in terms of functionality.

We've looked at a few options, but we have an internal policy that says, unless noted otherwise, network equipment has to be Cisco based. We had to go with a Cisco product.

We evaluated some Palo Alto and Juniper solutions, but Cisco ASA Firewall is better in terms of ease of use. You could get certified in it.

I have experience with SonicWall, Fortinet, Juniper, and Sophos firewalls, among others. We work with Fortinet and Palo Alto. It's not that we only do Cisco. But I can say from my experience that I am really more convinced about Cisco products.

What customers really like about Cisco, the number-one thing that they are really happy about within Firepower—and it was also in the old ASA code, but it's even more a feature in Firepower—is that the configuration is in modules. It's modular. You have different policies for the different functions within your firewall, so that your access control policy is only for your access lists and that's it. You have a different network address translation policy. It's all separated into different policies, so a customer knows exactly where to look to configure something, to change something, or to look at something which is not working properly.

Also, with Cisco, when a customer is not totally certain about a change he's going to make, he can make a copy of the specific access control policy or the NAT policy. If something doesn't go right, he can assign the copied policy back to the device and everything is back to the way it was. 

These are the biggest advantages our customers see. When a customer doesn't have any knowledge about firewalls, I can explain the basics in a couple of hours and they have enough familiarity to start working with it. They see the different modules and they know how to make a backup of a specific module so that they can go back to the previous state if something goes wrong.

Yes

I did evaluate other options but ultimately went with Cisco because of the support they offer. You can reach their tech support engineers at any time. That's important. Their documentation is great as well. Their site is wonderful. 

I considered pfSense, but when I checked the reviews, pfSense's reviews were really bad, so we purchased Cisco ASA.

We are currently looking at WatchGuard, pfSense, and Fortinet FortiGate. Netgate would provide the hardware.

We have still got nine months left on our contract with AT&T before we can actually do anything. We are just trying to do as much research and ask as many questions as we can before we get to that point.

Other IDS/IPS products were looked at.

During our initial decision-making process, we evaluated other options but the distinctions between all the options were quite minimal.

Our network guy looked at alternatives and settled on Cisco ASA. It was the cheapest available option, virtualized, and he was familiar with Cisco, like many people are because it's a great company. It made the most sense at the time, because our VPC was a sandbox at first. Now, it has grown, which is where the pain point is: the scalability of the ASA. We have sort of wedged ourselves into a corner.

We are now looking into Cisco Meraki, the CSR stuff, and the SD-WAN technology.

I am not sure about it because back then, I was just an engineer. I didn't have decision-making authority, so I wasn't involved with it.

We recently have done pilots with Check Point and FortiGate for a couple of months. They were next-generation firewalls. So, they had much more capability than ASA, but because of being a pilot, we didn't get full-scale throughput like big enterprise-level firewalls. The throughput was not enough, and their memory cache was always filling up. They were smaller models, but both of them had the features that ASA was lacking. Traffic shaping in ASA is not as good, but these two had good traffic shaping.

We've looked at the Fortinet solution. The Fortinet FortiGate.

My current company has been using ASA for quite a long time, so I was not involved in the choices.

I have been participating in choosing a new vendor and new equipment for some specific purposes as we go forward. For a next-generation firewall, Cisco's product — a combination of ASA and Firepower — is not the best solution. We are choosing a different vendor and going with Palo Alto for next-generation solutions because we feel it is better.

We evaluated Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet FortiGate, and Checkpoint products.

Nine or ten years ago, there were few options at the time.

Currently, we are using Barracuda for our more general Internet access. We use Cisco for our more protected environment.

• Fortinet
• Juniper

Cisco NGFW's ability to provide visibility into threats is good compared to other solutions. The visibility is quite impressive and gives us what we're looking for, based on our security requirements.

I can see the differences between Cisco and Check Point. 

Cisco has a solution called Umbrella which was called OpenDNS before, and from my point of view, Umbrella can reduce 60 percent of the attack surface because it checks the validity of the DNS. It will check all the links you click on to see if they are real or fake, using the signature link. If any of them are unknown, they will go straight to the sandbox. Those features do not exist with Check Point.

We are not restricted to any one vendor, but this solution worked well as a direct replacement for our previous one. We considered both Juniper and FortiGate.

We did look at Barracuda.

We have used many other solutions in the past and we constantly look out for other options. So we didn't switch to Cisco ASAv, we simply started using it together with another solution. We now use two products in the same time.

We also evaluated Fortinet and Juniper.

We evaluated VMware Virtual Networking and Check Point.

We chose Cisco because of the support and their roadmap for the changing technology landscape is good. Therefore, it is always better to be partnered with them.

I had no choice.

We are moving forward with ELA 5.0 for all Cisco security devices. Prior to that decision, we did a PoC with Palo Alto 3020 and 220 firewalls and Panorama. Those are some great products, but we are so Cisco centric that the cost of ELA isn’t much more than we are spending now.

We have FortiGate firewalls, the security of Office 365 from Microsoft, Cisco Umbrella, and Kaspersky Anti-virus. We are also using Cisco ASA, Meraki switches, and a router from Cisco.

The Firepower Management Center tool is very slow. We also have the FortiGate firewalls and these tools for configuring the firewall are faster.

We have to make a change to our devices in South America. We are currently evaluating Cisco Firepower Series 1000 versus FortiGate. Firepower is more powerful than FortiGate, but FortiGate is more flexible and easier to configure. Because of our last issues with Firepower, it is possible that FortiGate is more stable.

We have evaluated various open-source solutions for our clients.

The main difference with Cisco is that it is a big company, and their products are very easy to use. They have the best routers, switches, and firewalls.

Before selecting this as a solution we really didn't evaluate other options at all.

I did consider other options as I have experience with Meraki and other devices. Meraki is simpler to use, but I decided on Cisco ASAv. 

I was not the researcher and decision maker. I inherited the tool.

We evaluated a Sophos firewall but when I checked the reviews, I found that Sophos did not rate as well in terms of IPS, IDS, and malware protection.

Yes, this included firewalls from Huawei, Fortinet, Sangfor, and Sophos. Most of the customers end up with:

• Fortinet,
  
• Sophos
• Sangfor

We also considered Check Point. We chose Cisco because of its capabilities. We didn't need something so complex for this solution, just a straightforward firewall. It met our requirements. 

Yes, all.

It's great buying the latest and greatest equipment, but no so great if your engineers don't know how to operate it!

From experience, hardware purchasing is normally dependent on the technical expertise of engineers, so if all your engineers are Cisco trained, it makes no sense to buy another vendor firewall.

We evaluate all other options.

We did not evaluate any alternative options for stateful firewalling.

I evaluated many products, such as CheckPoint, Palo Alto, Fortinet Firewall, Sophos, and Cyberoam Firewall.

I don't know if the company evaluated other solutions before choosing Cisco. When I came to the company, it was already there. Cisco is a very popular enterprise solution so they may have just chosen it without other evaluations.

Palo Alto Networks NGFW Firewall was compared in-house using the same configuration and testing, and it won hands-down.

Check Point, FortiGate, Palo Alto, SonicWall, Huawei, and Sophos.

No. I went straight to Cisco because of my experience with their CUCM IPT solutions, routers and switches.

ASA is best for VPN solutions, site to site, remote access VPN. It's for everything that is connected with VPN solutions. For every other feature, Firepower is better. While Firepower is getting better for VPN, it's not where it should be yet.

I have tried configuring Zyxel firewalls. I have never logged in to Check Point or Palo Alto. From my point of view, Firepower is better than Xyxel when it comes to application visibility and control.

I did use competitive solutions many years ago, so things might have changed with them. But I would say that Cisco Firepower is a bit more complicated if you are an inexperienced user. If you are setting up a firewall for the first time, other vendors have an approach that makes it easier. Cisco Firepower it's more detailed and you can do more complicated configurations than you can with some competitors. It is easier for us to approach customers with Cisco Firepower, because we can do more detailed configurations compared to what customers can get from other vendors.

With SecureX, you can get more value out of the product, especially if you're using all the security features from Cisco. In that situation, you will definitely get more out of SecureX. When you do that you can integrate all of your Cisco products into SecureX and you can correlate all the data in one place, with a single pane of glass. In that way, you get a lot more value for money with Cisco Firepower and SecureX. You will get the full value if you combine it with other products, but if you only have Cisco Firepower then SecureX will not provide that much added value.

Whenever I go for a new solution, I test many leaders "NOT RELYING ON GARTNER", yet going for sites that are related to technical evaluations and real case studies. The vendors were Sophos Cyberoam, Barracuda, FortiGate, Websense, & Check Point.

We don't evaluate different solutions because our infrastructure is Cisco-based. We wanted it to be homogeneous with our infrastructure. 

We have looked at Juniper, Palo Alto and other brands.

I compared Cisco with Fortinet, Checkpoint, and DIY solutions.

We evaluated other solutions like Juniper, but we chose Cisco, since our network was becoming more and more Cisco oriented.

We did not evaluate any alternative solutions.

In locations where I have used Cisco ASA firewalls, I have compared FortiGate and SonicWall.

My client is looking for a next-generation firewall solution to replace the Cisco ASA.

What they need is a step up from what they already have that includes application-controlled firewall rules, as well as other features that ASA doesn't currently have.

Our company has five or six tools that it uses for security. For firewalls, we have Check Point, Palo Alto, Juniper SRX, and CIsco ASA. Those are the primary ones. I think it's good there is some diversity. 

The GUI for Cisco ASA is the easiest one to use, if you get it to work. Also, Cisco ASA is stable and easy to use, which are the most important things.

The firewall that I was exposed to before was Check Point.

We gave them Palo Alto as an alternative option. I think they were more into Cisco. They did not evaluate the Palo Alto though, they just opted for Cisco.

I have considered Check Point and Juniper in the past.

When the choice was made, some comparison was made with other market leaders but integration with the existing Cisco network was a really important positive side in the final decision.

No.

We evaluated Fortinet and SonicWall, both great UTM vendors. Although those platforms are cheaper, we decided to go with Cisco because stability and reliability were mayor concerns for us, also the support is much better in my experience.

We did not evaluate other products. One reason was that we believe that the ASA is a reliable product and fits our needs. Another reason, was the lack of local support for other solutions.

I have used firewalls from Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point. To configure an ASA for VPN, there are a lot of steps. When it comes to the FortiGate, it's just a few clicks. FortiGate also has built-in templates for configuring VPN. When you want to create a VPN between FortiGate and FortiGate, the template is already there. All you need to do is enter an IP address. When you want to configure a VPN with a third-party using the FortiGate, and say the third-party is Cisco, there is a VPN template for Cisco built into the FortiGate. So FortiGate is very easy to configure, compared to Cisco. But the Cisco firewall is powerful.

Check Point is something like Cisco but if I have to choose between Cisco and Check Point firewalls, I will choose Cisco because of all the features that Cisco has. With Cisco you can do a lot of things, when it comes to advanced malware protection and IPS. Check Point is very complicated to manage. They have recently come out with Infinity where there is a central point of management.

Palo Alto has a lot of functionality but I haven't worked on the newer models.

We evaluated other solutions, like Fortinet, HPE, Juniper, Check Point, but Cisco ASA was what we need.

None. My old company was a complete Cisco shop.

Yes, Fortinet and Palo Alto.

• Watchguard
• Sonicwall
• Checkpoint

We will probably change to a higher version in the near future or migrate to a next-generation firewall which would include IPI and some other new features. This makes sense because our current firewall ends the support in several years. 

Cisco FirePower, the next-generation firewall, is much better for stability.

We also checked Fortinet and Palo Alto, their AWS versions. 

When compared products, Cisco ASA is easy on AWS. We received a trial version. It is easy to setup and evaluate.

We also already had Cisco products. This provided a tighter integration with what we already had. Since most of our traffic stays in AWS, it made sense to use AWS Cisco ASAv.

Usually yes. We did like Huawei and Juniper.

While we have a partnership with Cisco, there are other products that have been used within the company. After evaluating other products such as those by Barracuda, it just happened that this solution worked out better for us. I like the Cisco reputation.

We checked out Check Point and FortiGate.

Netscreen, Netgear, Checkpoint, others..

subscription payment  

We have also evaluated Fortinet and Sophos UTM as possible solutions.

Yes, I evaluated Fortigate, SonicWall and Juniper but found Cisco ASA to be the best solution for us above all of the others.

• Juniper
• FortiGate

No other products were evaluated.

We also work with Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, FireEye, and some other vendors.

We did not evaluate any alternatives.

My clients did evaluate other options but ultimately chose this product. Other than the VPN connection, I don't know the reasons for this decision.

Check Point and Fortigate. Generally, our customers choose Firepower because they've seen the system work somewhere before, and they see it is stable and working perfectly. Those are the reasons they opt for Firepower.

We evaluated Palo Alto and CheckPoint.

No options were evaluated. We heavily rely on Cisco hardware for our infrastructure

Yes, and we chose Cisco ASA mainly due to the fact that they have a very good, reliable and very responsive technical customer support.

I tried Sophos.

We evaluated Juniper, Fortinet, and Huawei.

We evalutated Cisco ASA vs Fortinet FortiGate VM.

Juniper, Fortinet.

FortiGate 100D.

No other options were looked at.

FortiGate.

Our customers also evaluate PaloAlto.

We didn't look at any other solutions. All of our campuses use Cisco products. This is why we chose this solution. 

We evaluated Huawei, briefly.

If so, which ones? Yes, Checkpoint, Juniper, Cyberoam.

Not really, as all firewalls do most of what enterprises look for. What matters most is the after sales support.

We didn't evaluate any alternative products.

Depends on the customer's budget, but we evaluate all vendors that meet the them. It's a mission-critical product.

I think evaluated other options with reference to our architecture.

We also evaluated Juniper firewalls.

Juniper, Check Point, Astaro

Evaluation is mandatory in IT, and we have found this device has better features and reliability when compared to other products.

I would always prefer to evaluate other products when I have been asked for advice on firewall solutions.

We evaluated Cisco and Meraki.

Yes, a couple of other of OEMs: Fortinet, Barracuda, etc.

There were no other solutions looked at.

Going forward, we are evaluating Anomali. The founder of ArcSight founded Anomali. The product has the ability to be a consumer of threat intelligence, and be a contributor showing the maturity in threat protection posture.

We evaluated Fortinet, Sophos, Palo Alto.

I also evaluated Juniper and CheckPoint solutions.

Before choosing, I evaluated Juniper Networks SRX.

No other options were evaluated.

I evaluated Sophos UTM, Checkpoint, Cisco and PA. PA is the best fit for my company because Sophos acquired Cyberoam and their software wasn’t successful for domain user restrictions. Checkpoint was very slow for me and too many licences and it was complicated. Cisco acquired Sourcefire and they need to improve next-gen features. So I chose PA.

I haven't, and my first experience working with ASA, was a project with the specifications already defined